Friday Friends

Since I've retired I now have Fridays off.  That means that I am able to attend Friday Friends, a ladies' Bible study at my church.  It is a wonderful group of ladies including moms of toddlers, single ladies, stay-at-home moms, homeschool moms, and retired moms like me.  We share food, fellowship, prayer requests and Bible teaching.

This past Friday I had the opportunity to teach the group.  When I told Phil I was trying to decide what to teach, never to be one to withhold his opinion,  he said, "I know what you should tell them.  You should tell them to get up from the table immediately and go home and bake something.  Teach them to take better care of their husbands."

Then he reminded me of this cartoon that we saw a few weeks ago...

Now don't worry.  He was being sarcastic.  

But it got me to thinking about these verses in Titus 2:

3 Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. 4 Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.

So I went with it.  What a great discussion we had!  We got down to the nitty-gritty of what it means to love your husband, what loving your children really looks like, what "being busy at home" is all about, and last, but certainly not least, what it means to be subject to your husband.

None of this stuff is easy.  It's hard work.  It's messy and pesky and confusing.  But it's what our real life, here and now, is all about.  And if we can't apply our Christianity in our homes with our husbands and children, where can we apply it?  On the other side of the coin, if we don't talk about the struggles we have in living this out in our homes and marriages, how can we overcome, how can we stand the storms?  Because they're there for all of us, and they're tough.  If we never tell people how we struggle, we make them feel like they are the only ones who feel this way, that what is happening to them is not natural.  And we set them up for discouragement and failure.

So we shared, honestly and openly.  And it was good for our souls.  

‎"With self-discipline, most anything is possible." -Theodore Roosevelt


I think discipline in one's life is one of the things most lacking in our culture today.  When you think of all the negative things that come from lack of discipline (anger, weight gain, being unhealthy, debt...I could go on and on) and all the good things that come from discipline (peace, health, wealth, etc.) it's amazing that we don't emphasize it more.  So I've taken to re-reading the book, Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster.  He opens with these words:


Superficiality is the curse of our age.  The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem.  The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

With so many good books out there to read, it takes a lot to commit time to a book I've already read.  But this book is so practical that I know I'll get something new from it that I didn't get the last time I read it.  

The first discipline is meditation on the Scripture.  A couple of highlights:

Moses learned, albeit with many vacillations and detours, how to hear God's voice and obey his word.  In fact, Scripture witnesses that god spoke to Moses "face to face, as a man speaks to his friend" (Ex. 33:11).  There was a sense of intimate relationship, of communion.  As a people, however, the Israelites were not prepared for such intimacy.  Once they learned a little about god, they realized that being in his presence was risky business and told Moses so: "You speak to us and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die" (Ex. 20:19).  In this way they could maintain religious respectability without the attendant risks.

The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between.  In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves.  Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change.

And where do we meet God?  Where do we come into his presence?  In His Word.  The author goes on to suggest practical ways to meditate upon God's Word.  I got a least one tip that I want to put into practice.  Good thoughts.